Wednesday, October 21, 2015

The Secret UFO History of Presidents - Roosevelt to Obama

Could President Truman have known the story behind the
front page news from July 28, 1952?

For decades, pulp fiction writers, film-makers, and
countless UFO researchers have maintained that a veil of secrecy surrounds the
government’s knowledge of extraterrestrial beings. But does this veil – if it
exists – mask more than 70 years worth of verifiable findings from even the
office of the President of the United States?

Author Larry Holcombe believes
the answer is “yes”, and he has set forth the evidence for that belief in his
book, The Presidents and UFOs: A Secret
History from FDR to Obama (St. Martin’s Press). The Baltimore Post-Examiner
recently spoke with Holcombe about his extensive research, which included weeks
spent gleaning records in several presidential libraries. Holcombe will be one
of the featured speakers at this Saturday’s Mysteries of Space & Sky Conference. The highly regarded annual UFO conference will be held in nearby Gambrills, Maryland.

Thank you for taking some time to speak with us today.
To start, would you please tell us about your background? What led to your
interest in UFO’s?

LH: (Larry Holcombe) When
I was in junior high, I found a couple of Major Donald Keyhoe’s books – Flying
Saucers From Outer Space and Flying Saucers Are Real – in my school library.
Keyhoe was a retired Marine aviator who wrote for a number of publications in
the late 1940’s. When he started to write about the flying saucer phenomenon
for True Magazine, Keyhoe was a skeptic. But within a year, he became convinced
that the Air Force was concealing UFO evidence.

When I graduated from high school, the Vietnam War was
in progress. I joined the National Guard and served 8 years there. Then I went
into selling commercial construction products, and eventually represented a
manufacturer out of Chicago as a military sales manager. I closed out my
business career developing the military sales for this company and traveled all
over.

In your interaction with the military, did you ever
talk about your interest in UFOs?

LH: I had some conversation, but very little.
Unfortunately now, I look back on it and see that other people do the same
thing; they keep it to themselves. They don’t talk about it, because it may
affect their careers. A good friend who retired as a full colonel in the Air
Force has a number of high-ranking officer friends who have said they are
willing to talk with me. They say, “Yeah, I’d love to talk with him, but I don’t
really know anything about the subject.” Whether you’ve got 3 or 4 stars on
your shoulder, if you don’t have a need to know, then you don’t know.

Your book is about UFOs and the presidents. Do the
presidents have a need to know?

LH: That’s a very good question. Let me answer it this
way. President Truman undoubtedly had a need to know.

It is believed Truman set up an inside group, called
MJ-12 or Majestic 12. This group was made up of six eminent scientists and six
high-ranking military officers, including General Nathan Twining, and it charged them with handling all flying saucer
issues. This was in 1947, right after Roswell and right after the National
Security Act was passed and the CIA was created. Truman was deeply involved in
it, although you won’t find any Truman biographer who will talk about it. There
are even film clips of Truman talking about flying
saucers. And there were
world-wide headlines being made during the Truman Administration over flying
saucers. The famous 1952 Washington merry-go-round, where Washington was
overflown by numbers of these crafts. Truman got his military aide, General
Robert Landry, and said (Truman had a salty tongue), “Hey get out there to find
out just what the Hell is going on. I want this information to come back to me
and me only.” It would strictly be handled by the office of the President.

When Truman left office, Eisenhower came in under the
same general guidelines. It is my belief, based on my research, that the flying
saucer issue had become so big that, after Eisenhower came into office, control
of the information was slowly stripped away from the White House and placed
into the hands of the intelligence community and the military industrial
complex. The military industrial complex is as capable – or more – of keeping
secrets than the intelligence community. They are very, very good at it.

Is that where this information still resides?

President Harry S. Truman charged Robert Landry to,
“find out what the Hell is going on”.

LH: I think that’s where it resides now, so today, the
presidents really know very little of it. I think it depends on who the
president is, how favorable they are looked upon by the intelligence community.
President George H.W. Bush was highly regarded by the intelligence community.

BPE: George H. W. Bush had been CIA Director at one
point.

LH: Yes, but only for one year. People forget that.
They think that, because he was Director of the CIA, that he had all the data.
Bush was only director for one year, but CIA headquarters is named after him.
So he was truly on the inside. I think people like Bill Clinton were frowned
upon by the intelligence community, and knew very little of it. Jimmy Carter,
who had a UFO sighting, said that he would open up all UFO files once he got
into office, yet he learned nothing from it. Reagan probably was briefed on it
in some detail. But I really think all contemporary presidents, with the
exception of Richard Nixon, probably have only limited knowledge of it. I think
there are some people in government that have a great deal of knowledge. Former
Vice President Dick Cheney probably has a great deal of knowledge of the UFO
subject, as may Donald Rumsfeld. I think they are two people on the political
side that are, and have been, involved in it.

BPE: You’ve mentioned a number of the presidents from
Truman to Clinton. Let me ask a specific question about President Clinton.
There is a story that Clinton reached out to the intelligence community through
his friend, Assistant Attorney General Webster Hubbell. Is there anything to
this story?

LH: Well, the only story there is that when Clinton
took office, he said to Webb Hubbell, “I want you to find two things for me as
quickly as you can: who killed JFK and what really happened at Roswell.” There
was probably more to the conversation, but the bottom line was Hubbell came up
empty. He couldn’t get anything. So here you have a President of the United
States asking for information on UFO’s, and he in essence is being denied the
files or told they don’t exist.

Have you ever been to Roswell?

Major Jesse Marcel holds some of the debris recovered
from the 1947 incident near Roswell, New Mexico. (Roswell Daily Record)

LH: I have been to Roswell every year for the Roswell
festival. I’ve been invited by the International UFO Museum and Research Center every year since 2011 for their 3 or 4 day event, to
lecture at the Museum. They gave me a lifetime membership this past July.

The museum in Roswell is quite interesting. I know
they have scores of letters and affidavits posted throughout the main hall which
validates, in one form or another, that something did happen there in 1947
which doesn’t follow the official party line.

LH: Well, Roswell has some 200 witnesses who have come
forward. Some may not be totally believable. People, after so many years, can
stretch the truth. But Roswell is of special interest to me. I am convinced
that Roswell was an extraterrestrial event. I can’t prove it. I can’t give you
a piece of the saucer. But there is so much evidence that that’s what it was;
and the Air Force has lied so many times that instead of building their
credibility, they’ve gone a long way to destroying their credibility.

You get all sorts of arguments over Roswell, but there
are 6-7 basic facts that when taken together make it very, very hard to support
what the Air Force said crashed there.

Between the economy and two continuing wars, both
Presidents George W. Bush and Barak Obama have certainly had their hands full.
Have either one of them expressed any interest in the UFO phenomena?

LH: I think that George W. Bush was so involved with
terrorism after 9-11 that he gave very little consideration to the subject.
When asked about it once, his reply was, “Go ask Cheney”.

When I wrote the book, I thought that Obama had very
little background knowledge. That the intelligence community would not trust
him or give him much information at all. But during his recent appearance on
the Jimmy Kimmel Show, when asked about the subject, his response was something
like, “They don’t let us talk about that.” He said it in sort of a joking way,
but that’s how he brushed it off. “They don’t let us talk about that”. Well,
who is “they”? So I think there is probably a lot of truth in what he said.
That he has been briefed to some limited degree, but how much a president is
briefed now depends on who the president is and how much information they want
to give him.

I know this may sound conspiratorial, but the people I
call the keepers of the secret call the shots on how much a president knows. If
there was a major UFO sighting by thousands of people, like there was in Phoenix, the president would probably be briefed on that; to
what extent I do not know.

You’re talking about intrigue here, and in my mind –
that brings us back to Richard Nixon.

LH: My book is actually built around the Nixon
administration and what I believe was a desire to release at least some
information on an extraterrestrial presence. That’s another story in and of
itself, but my research shows that Nixon supported using a made for TV
documentary to expose an alien presence. But then, along came Watergate and
that all went away. The documentary, by the way, was eventually made, with Rod Serling as
the host.

Comedian Jackie Gleason with Richard Nixon.

Aside from this documentary, I’ve heard that Nixon may
have shared some of this information with one of his closest friends.

LH: We know that Jackie Gleason thought that the
government was concealing UFO information. He was very concerned and irritated
that the government was not divulging some of the information they had on an
extraterrestrial presence.

Now it is clear to me that Nixon had a great interest
in the UFO subject. He was also a very good friend of Jackie Gleason. They
played golf together, and I think it’s reasonable to believe that Gleason bent
Nixon’s ear about disclosure; that they talked extensively about the subject.
Gleason called his house in New York the Mother Ship, and some of the smaller
out buildings looked like flying saucers. When Gleason died, his wife gave 1600
volumes on UFOs to the University of Miami library.

Does your book deal with presidents prior to Truman and
the events of 1948?

Yes; but it only goes back to 1941 in the
administration of Franklin Roosevelt. I’ve heard the stories about George
Washington going into the woods at Valley Forge and having some sort of an
alien encounter; it could be. You’ve got to be skeptical but also have an open
mind with these things. If you don’t, you won’t do a decent job as a
researcher.

My book goes back to 1941, and the first incident that
I report was told by a lady named Charlotte Mann. Mann said her grandfather,
who was a Baptist minister, was called to an airplane crash in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. When he got there, it was not an aircraft as he knew
it but a disc-shaped object which had crashed. Two or three very small men – 3
1/2-4 foot tall – occupants with big heads and big eyes, were dead, laying on
the ground. So he went ahead and said a prayer for them. The fire department
was there. Photographs had been taken, and then the military showed up. And
when the military showed up, they confiscated everything, including the
photographers’ film. Then the military commander got everyone together and said,
“Folks, this is a very serious matter of national security. You are never to
speak of it again to anyone at any time.”

If it wasn’t Japanese aircraft, what were coastal
batteries shooting at during the Battle of Los Angeles?

Anyway, Charlotte Mann, who was a very small child at
the time, remembers that she grew up with this being whispered about among the
family from time to time. Her grandmother told her the whole story as she was
dying of cancer. That’s the first incident and everything checks out as far as
people have been able to check it out.

Then I go into the 1942 Battle of Los Angeles, where some 1600 rounds of anti-aircraft artillery
were fired at a strange object that flew over the coast of Southern California.
There was a lot of war news in 1942, but it was a pretty big deal and reported
in the newspapers extensively. Some people were even reported to have had heart
attacks over the event.

So your book deals with both verifiable facts and
informed speculation?

LH: There are letters, which are not documented, that
I do put in the book that I got from Dr. Robert Woods, a retired executive from
McDonnell Douglas aircraft. Dr. Woods’ interest was started because McDonnell
Douglas had a stake in UFOs. They wanted to know what the propulsion systems
were, and they wanted to find out before Lockheed found out. It was a pure
business decision, so McDonnell Douglas spent about $500,000, and Bob Woods
headed that effort up.

When Bob retired, he became so enamored with the UFO
question that he started his effort in authenticating leaked documents. Well,
there are several leaked documents in his possession that were between
President Roosevelt (FDR) and General George C. Marshall.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt. (New York
Public Library)

In one letter General Marshall told FDR that two objects
had been recovered after the Battle of Los Angeles, one by the Navy in the sea
between Los Angeles and Catalina Island, and a similar object that they
recovered in the San Bernadino mountains. I think his exact words were that the
objects bore no resemblance to anything conventional. He went on to say that
the only explanation is that they are other-worldly. I think those were his
terms.

I also discuss that Roosevelt wrote George Marshall
and said that, as soon as the United States was victorious in the war, which
obviously he was consumed with, that they (the army and the government) would
have the fruit of these wonders that we have come into possession of. And I
think he even mentioned atomic weapons. But that was before anybody knew about
the atomic bomb, and I’m assuming here that if Roosevelt talked about atomic
power, he knew about it secretly. So he presumed that that’s what these craft
must have been powered by. But that’s an assumption on my part.

The reason I put that in the book is because the
terminology seemed correct for the time. For some reason, this subject seems to
generate a lot of people coming forward and hoaxing things. I’m not a
psychologist; I don’t understand why people do such ridiculous things. It does
seem to occur quite often, so you have to be very careful. But because these
documents had a ring of authenticity to them, I did include them in the book.

- See more at:
http://www.educatinghumanity.com/2015/10/ufo-secrets-know-by-presidents.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EducatingHumanity+%28Educating+Humanity%29#sthash.nIBPepsl.dpuf